My continuing love of baseball is inseparably linked to memories of my father. On summer nights, when he came home from work, the two of us would sit together on our porch, reliving that day's Brooklyn Dodger game, which I had permanently preserved in the large red scorebook he'd given me for my seventh birthday.

I can still remember how proud I was when I first mastered all the miniature symbols that allowed me to record every movement, play by play, of our favorite players, Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges. With the scorebook spread between us, my dad would ask me questions about different plays, whether a strikeout was called for swinging, and if I'd been careful in my scoring, I would know the answers. At such moments, when he smiled at me, I could not help but smile too, for he had one of those contagious smiles that started in his eyes and traveled across his face, leaving laugh lines on either side of his mouth.

Sometimes a particular play would trigger in my dad a memory of a similar situation, framed forever in his mind, and suddenly we were back in time recalling the Dodgers of his childhood  Casey Stengel, Zack Wheat, and Jimmy Johnston. Mingling together the present and the past, our conversations nurtured within me an irresistible fascination with history, which has remained to this day.

It fell to me to be the family scorekeeper not only because I was the third daughter and youngest child, but because my idea of a perfect afternoon was lying in front of our ten-inch-screen television, watching baseball. What is more, there was real power in being the one to keep score. For all through my early childhood, my father kept from me the knowledge that the daily papers printed daily box scores, permitting me to imagine that without my symbolic renderings of all the games he had missed while he was at work, he would never have been able to follow the Dodgers in the only proper way a team should be followed, day by day, inning by inning. In other words, without me, his love for baseball would be forever unrequited.

In our neighborhood in Rockville Center, New York, allegiance was equally divided among Dodger, Yankee and Giant fans. As families emigrated from different parts of the city to the suburbs of Long Island, the old loyalties remained intact, creating rival enclaves on every street. Born and bred in Brooklyn, my father would always love the Dodgers, fear the Giants, and hate the abominable Yankees.

The butcher shop in our neighborhood was owned by a father and son, Old Joe and Young Joe Schmidt. They were both rabid Giant fans, as was Max, the man in charge of the vegetables. Knowing how much I loved baseball, they all took great delight in teasing me. They called me Ragmop, in honor of my unruly hair, and they constantly made fun of my Dodgers. I'd pretend to be angry, but the truth was that I loved going into their shop; I loved the sawdust on the floor, the sides of beef hanging from the ceiling, the enormous walk-in freezer behind the counter. And most of all, I loved the attention I received.

During the glorious summer of 1951, when I was eight years old and the Dodgers seemed invincible, I visited my friends in the butcher shop every day. Jackie Robinson was awesome that year, hitting .338; Roy Campanella was the MVP; Gil Hodges hit 40 homers. It seemed that no one could beat us. But then, in the third week of August, the Giants began an astonishing stretch that whittled the Dodger lead away until the season ended in a tie.

When the deciding play-off began, I was so nervous I couldn't sit by the television. Each time the Giants came to bat in the early innings, I left the room, returning only when I knew they were out and the Dodgers were up. I began to relax slightly as the Dodgers pulled ahead 4-1, but when the Giants came to bat in the last of the ninth, I could hear the beating of my heart. Then, as Bobby Thomson stepped up to the plate, with one run in and two men on base, my sister Charlotte predicted that he would hit a home run and win the game for the Giants. When Thomson did precisely that, crushing Ralph Branca's pitch into the left field stand, I thought for a moment my sister had made it happen and I hated her with all my heart.

In the days that followed, I refused to go into the butcher shop, unable to face the mocking laughter that I imagined would accompany my first steps into the store. I was wrong. After a week's absence, a bouquet of flowers arrived at my door. "Ragmop, come back," the card read. "We miss you. Your friends at Bryn Mawr Meat Market."

"Wait till next year," my father consoled, repeating a refrain that would become all too familiar in the years ahead. But at eight years of age, it was easy to gamble in expectation, to believe that as soon as winter gave way to spring, a splendid new season would begin.

This indomitable belief in the future was vitally important to me when I was a child, for my mother's life was slowly ebbing away. The rheumatic fever she had when she was young had left her heart permanently damaged; every year, it seemed, she suffered another heart attack, which sent her to the hospital for day or weeks at a time. I was never made privy to the full extent of her illness; on the contrary, I took great comfort from the ritual of knowing that each time she went away, she came back. It's only a matter of time, I kept telling myself, as the ambulance carried her away, until she'll walk through the door again and everything will be all right.

In my prayers, the Dodgers figured prominently. Every night I said two sets of Hail Marys and Our Fathers. Believing that each prayer was worth a certain number of days off my inevitable sentence to purgatory, I dedicated the first set of prayers to my account in heaven. At the end of the week I would add up my nightly prayers and fold the total into a note. "Dear God. I have said 935 days worth of prayers this week. Please put this into my account. I live at 125 Southard Avenue." My second set of prayers was directed toward more earthly desires, chief among them the wish for the Dodgers to win the World Series at least once before I died.

It took tense of thousands of Hail Marys and Our Fathers, but finally on October 4, 1955, the Dodgers won their first ever world championship. It was one of the happiest moments of my life, made all the more special because this time, I predicted the outcome. It the sixth inning, Sandy Amoros made a spectacular catch in left field of a wicked fly ball that would have tied the score with two Yankee runs. I knew then that the Dodgers would win, just as, on other occasions, a failed sacrifice or a double play signaled an inevitable loss.

Everything happened quickly after that until, stunningly, it was the bottom of the ninth with the Dodgers up 2-0. And this time there was no Bobby Thomson to destroy the cherished dreams of delirious Brooklyn fans. When my father came home that night, we celebrated by re-creating the entire game, play by play, and there was more. When the newspapers arrived on the lawn the next morning with the fabulous headline THIS IS NEXT YEAR, we relished every word as if we were hearing about the game for the first time.

Things fell apart too quickly after that magical summer. When I first heard the rumor that Brooklyn owner Walter O'Malley was contemplating taking the Dodgers to Los Angeles, I refused to believe it, assuming he was simply jockeying for a new stadium. I hated all the talk about the need for a new stadium. When they said Ebbets Field was too small, too dilapidated, I took it as a personal insult. I couldn't imagine a more beautiful place.

I dreamed one night I was being ushered into O'Malley's office to make the case for Brooklyn. He was standing behind his desk, a diabolic look on his face that chilled my heart. But as I started to talk, his face softened and when I finished, he threw his arms around me and promised to stay at Ebbets Field. I had saved the Dodgers for Brooklyn!

In reality, of course, neither I nor anyone else could prevent the unforgivable O'Malley form completing his invidious act of betrayal. When the move was officially announced in the fall of 1957, I felt as if I, too, were being uprooted. Never again to sit in the stands at Ebbets Field, never again to watch the papers for the first news out of spring training, it was impossible to imagine.

My sense of being uprooted was real. As the 1958 season got under way, a weird, empty season with neither the Dodgers nor the Giants in New York, my mother suffered another heart attack. As before, she was taken away, but this time she didn't return. Six months later, we sold our house and moved to an apartment. My father couldn't bear sleeping in his bedroom without my mother.

Suddenly, my feelings for baseball seemed an aspect of my departing youth, to be discarded along with my childhood freckles and my collection of Archie comics. I didn't entirely forget about baseball during those last years in high school, but without a team to root for, my emotions became detached; my heart wasn't in it anymore.

Then, one September day, having settled in Massachusetts while getting my Ph.D. at Harvard, I agreed, half reluctantly, to go to Fenway Park. There it was again; the cozy ball field scaled to human dimensions so that every word of encouragement and every scornful yell could be heard on the field; the fervent crowd that could, with equal passion, curse a player for today's failures after cheering his heroics the day before; the team that always seemed to break your heart in the last weeks of the season. It was love at first sight as I found myself directing all my old intensities toward my new team  the Boston Red Sox.

By this time, my dad had become a Mets fan so there was no need to feel guilty about my new love. Indeed, my return to baseball reinforced the old link between my father and me; providing endlessly absorbing topics for conversation. Once again our talks produced a sequence of mental images, vivid recollections of similar plays from the past; once again, we were united by an easy affection.

In the summer of 1972, while I was still single and teaching at Harvard, my father died. He had just settled down in his favorite chair to watch the Mets when he suffered a fatal heart attack. I remember the inconsolable feeling that the children I hoped to have someday would never know this extraordinary man, who had given me such steadfast love for so many years.

When I got married and had children my passion for the Sox assumed a strange urgency; at times I felt almost as if I were circling back to my childhood, as I found myself following the same rituals with my sons that I had practiced with my father. At Fenway Park, there are a number of ramps one can take to get from the crowded concession stands selling hot dogs, Cokes, tacos, and beer to the interior of the park itself. Ramp 33 is "my" ramp  with a curious attachment to a ritual my father followed by entering Ebbets Field at the same angle each time, I find myself walking up exactly the same ramp every game so that my first sight of the field comes at the same angle.

Indeed, sometimes when I close my eyes against the sun as I set with my boys at Fenway, I am suddenly back at Ebbets Field, a young girl once more in the presence of my father, watching the players of my youth on the grassy field below. There is magic in these moments, for when I open my eyes and see my sons in the place where my father once sat, I feel an invisible bond among our three generations, an anchor of loyalty linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they have never seen, but whose person they have come to know through this most timeless of all sports.

When the Sox won the pennant in 1986, my boys were absolutely certain they would win the World Series. I, of course, was less sure, having been at the edge of victory so many times before only to see my hopes dashed at the final moment. Yet by the sixth game, with the Sox leading 3 games to 2 over the Mets and ahead 5-3 in the bottom of the tenth, I told my husband to break out the champagne. Then, of course, in an agonizing replay of the Bobby Thomson fiasco, Boston first baseman Bill Buckner let a routine grounder slip through his legs and the Mets came back to win both the game and the World Series.

I tried to control my emotions but I couldn't. "Mom, it's all right," my boys consoled me. "They'll win next year. Don't worry."

Oh, my God, I thought. These kids don't know yet that the Sox haven't won since 1918, that this may be as close as they will ever come in any of our lifetimes. Suddenly I felt possessed of a terrible wisdom that I did not ever want to impart to my children.